Relay: Revolution Relived
Oh man, that was fun. Though it went by in a flash, as I’ve been telling people since Sunday, it was well worth it. Well worth the 57-mile after-work drive to and from the rehearsal studio in Bohemia. Well worth the hours holed up in the tiny and cluttered studio/writing room at home, learning new songs. And well worth all of Saturday’s downtime as the hours ticked away and the butterflies took flight.
It had been exactly one year since anything resembling a formal performance — a short-lived band that gave exactly one performance before falling apart, as these ventures usually do — and in the ensuing months I’d wavered between a mild enthusiasm to soldier on and, more often, fervent cynicism and negativity. When time allowed, I’d hole up in that tiny room in what seems a futile effort to attain even passable dexterity on the piano. The guitars weren’t played at all, silently gathering dust as they hung from the walls.
Is anyone even listening? Does anyone care? In my observation, live music is received as background noise. Don’t the kids prefer a D.J. these days?
Maybe, but the audience that packed Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Saturday, at least, showed a pronounced preference for the real thing. The crowd definitely skewed older, shall we say, and when queried at the top of the show, many testified to personal experience with the Fillmore East, a downtown Manhattan rock ’n’ roll venue that closed when I was 4 and to which this event paid tribute.
A few months ago, Randolph Hudson III, a guitarist and wonderful guy, asked if I owned a 12-string guitar. As it happened, I had bought one, on a whim, just a few months earlier when an offer I thought insultingly low was unexpectedly accepted. Randy kindly referred me to Joe Lauro, of the HooDoo Loungers and the Historic Films archive, who has helped to conceive and organize many similar musical events at Bay Street in the last few years.
Joe and I had a short conversation, and I was invited to play with a group that would perform music of Jefferson Airplane, a group I’d always liked yet wasn’t especially familiar with beyond a spellbinding scene in “Gimme Shelter,” the Maysles brothers’ document of a 1969 festival at which a young man was stabbed and kicked to death by members of the Hells Angels as the Rolling Stones played on.
Paul Kantner, who died in January, played the 12-string, an integral component of the psychedelic band’s sound. The “Airplane” would play between groups performing music of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, two other icons of rock ’n’ roll’s long-ago golden age.
In Bohemia — what a suitable name for these hippie revivalists’ rehearsal site — it was immediately apparent that Joe had assembled a fantastic crew, perhaps none more than the vocalists, George Feaster and Carolyn Droscoski, who would be our Marty Balin and Grace Slick. George, I later learned, is also an accomplished actor; as a frontman he is one of the best I’ve ever seen. When Carolyn belts out “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” it is, as Joe said, as though Ms. Slick is standing before you.
Time and logistics allowed for just two group rehearsals before the big day, and by Saturday we just about knew what we were doing. When it was time, we proceeded to the stage in darkness, the last minutes of the original “King Kong” playing on the screen overhead, as Jefferson Airplane had done at a Fillmore East concert.
“Well, Denham,” the police lieutenant said, “the airplanes got him.”
“Oh no,” Denham replied, the orchestral score swelling to its climax. “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
And then we were off, “3/5 Mile in 10 Seconds” and “The Other Side of This Life” and “White Rabbit” and more, ending with our own climactic “Volunteers” (“Got a revolution, got to revolution!”). It went by in a flash.
I hope those veterans of the Fillmore East were able to relive a moment in their lives, and I wish I could relive the moment I hope they relived, if that makes any sense. Can we all do that again?
Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.